Every year, the American Bar Association ranks the top legal blogs in America, including a category called “For Fun.” Although “fun lawyers” might sound like an oxymoron, this year’s list includes a bunch of truly giggle-worthy blogs. I’m honored that my own blog was included in the group. After the nominations were announced, the 2013 “For Fun” bloggers decided to interview each other. Here, for your amusement, is the resulting group interview.

1. What is your blog about?

Law and The Multiverse (by James Daily and Ryan Davidson): Examining comic book characters and stories from a legal perspective. Or alternatively, an excuse to be huge comic book nerds while hopefully teaching people something about the law.

The Prime-Time Crime Review (by Allison Leotta): I recap and reality-check Law & Order: SVU for what the show gets right and wrong, from my perspective as a former sex-crimes prosecutor.

Supreme Court Haiku Reporter (by Keith Jaasma): I take the most important legal issues of the day and completely trivialize them through bad poetry.

ZombieLaw (by Josh Warren): I blog about “zombies” in law and politics (from a cognitive linguistic perspective).

(Lowering the Bar and The Namby Pamby were also nominated, but didn’t finish their answers by the Murder She Writes deadline. They are nevertheless very funny.)

2. What drew you to writing your blog? (The big money, right?)

Prime-Time Crime: Blogging about TV shows’ errors is way more constructive than throwing slippers at the TV. Also, when my first novel, Law of Attraction, was published, Simon & Schuster told me I “needed a platform.”

S.Ct. Haiku: I had written several law review articles of 40 pages or more and was excited that 300 people downloaded them in a year. So I thought “what’s the fewest number of words I could write and still call it writing.” Haiku!

Law and the Multiverse: James started it on a lark after the idea was suggested by a friend over dinner. Ryan came on board after James posted it to MetaFilter.com.

ZombieLaw: I was in an academic group studying “creativity” as regards occupy wall street and #anonymous. Zombies sort of grew out of that.

3. The ABA says you are “Fun.” And yet you are a lawyer. Explain.

Law and The Multiverse: We make the law fun by heavily diluting it with comic books and pop culture. It’s like how gin (kind of gross) and tonic water (definitely gross) combine to make delicious gin & tonic.

ZombieLaw: Irony.

Prime-Time Crime: Airbrushing.

S.Ct. Haiku: Even the ABA makes mistakes.

4. What subject has sparked the most comments on your blog?

S.Ct. Haiku: The healthcare and immigration cases. That, and people wondering why I don’t tell more fart jokes.

Law and The Multiverse: We once suggested that Peter Parker (aka Spider-Man) was committing fraud by selling pictures of himself as Spider-Man to a newspaper without telling the paper that he was both the photographer and the subject. People were not happy about it. It got about 50% more comments than the next highest post.

ZombieLaw: Putin’s zombie gun is pretty popular.

Prime-Time Crime: Whether men or women commit more sex crimes. I did a (very scientific) analysis, and found that on SVU roughly 1/3 of the crimes are committed by women – while in real life, only a tiny fraction of sex offenders are female. Whenever I mention this, someone posts an article about a female perp, and it sparks a big debate.

5. Are there any topics you won’t write about? If so, write about them here.

ZombieLaw: I do try to stay on topic, but “zombies” are everywhere and law/politics touches everything so pretty much all topics are fair game. Some recent big zombie stories that I know I have intentionally ignored are the zombie stripper calendar, the walking dead infographic and also I mostly ignored the HALO military training until Senator Coburn reported on it.

S.Ct. Haiku: I try not to focus on the death penalty part of death penalty cases. Instead I focus on exciting issues like jurisdiciton and waiver.

Law and The Multiverse: We really shy away from real-world legal issues and stick to fiction. We don’t want to say “this guy who dresses up like a superhero and tries to fight crime is probably breaking the law himself” and then get slapped with a defamation suit. Nor do we want to weigh in on the IP disputes between comic book publishers, writers, and artists. No matter what side you take you lose; either the publishers hate you or the writers, artists, and fans do.

Prime-Time Crime: Sodomy, pedophilia, necrophilia, bestiality, amputation fetishes, and vodka tampons have all been featured on SVU episodes, and thus they have all been discussed on my blog. Thank God my husband understands what I do – otherwise, he might faint if he looked at my Google search history.

6. How do you deal with snarky or inappropriate comments? What’s the craziest comment you’ve ever gotten?

ZombieLaw: All comments require approval before appearing. Most comments are not approved and most of those are obvious spam. Someone tried to post a picture link to Judge Alito made into a zombie but there was what appeared to be a bullet hole in his head. Though I do personally enjoy turning judges into zombie images, I prefer it not be suggestive of actual death. I would want to encourage my readers’ art but I was honestly afraid that approving that particular comment might get me a visit from the U.S. Marshals Service. My own zombie art aims for the more surrealist-fantastical with chunks of brain, demon eyes and gory mouths. Surely, lots of people think my art is gross too but I do try to keep some aesthetic standards.

S.Ct. Haiku: Most people seem too frightened by the haiku concept to make any comments.

Prime-Time Crime: I love how many of my commenters come back week after week. I feel like I’ve gotten to “know” several readers this way, although we’ve never met in real life. Given the nature of SVU, some sensitive conversations are had and personal confessions made. I’m happy to say that, in these instances, the commenters have generally been polite and respectful.

Law and The Multiverse: We actually get very few of them. We try to set a civil tone and we think the commenters have picked up on that. In over two years of doing this we’ve gotten maybe half a dozen inappropriate comments and emails. Most of them have been so obviously inappropriate (e.g. obscene language or they simply said “this is a dumb blog”) that we’ve just deleted them, or rather did not approve them in the moderation queue, since they were always first-time comments. We did get one particularly unusual comment from a fellow who wanted to sue the Canadian government because it had been controlling his mind for over eight years. Unfortunately that’s probably less “crazy” and more “actually mentally ill.”

7. In a cage match, who would win: Antonin Scalia or Elena Kagan, and why?

ZombieLaw: While surely they both have tiger blood, neither is winning. It would be one hell of a cock fight but both birds would end up dead with no clear victory. It’d be like two schizophrenics arguing about who ate the last donut (there’s a hole in this joke).

Law and The Multiverse: Scalia has the height advantage (5’7″ to 5’3″, according to IMDB of all places), and we’re going to guess he has the weight advantage as well. Scalia is a Sicilian who grew up in New Jersey. Kagan grew up on the Upper West Side. We don’t want to stereotype, but let’s face it: Scalia is going to fight dirty. On the other hand, Kagan is 24 years younger. We’ll call it a draw.

Prime-Time Crime: To paraphrase from The Princess Bride, “Never get involved in a land war in Asia or go against a Sicilian when death is on the line.”

S.Ct. Haiku: Scalia. He appears to have a lower center of gravity.

8. Where do you find the time to do this?

S.Ct. Haiku: Between the cushions of my sofa.

ZombieLaw: I don’t. I was never here. The zombie did it.

Prime-Time Crime: While my kids are sleeping (like many working moms).

Law and The Multiverse: James’s day job is in academia. Ryan may or may not have a time machine.

9. Now that you’ve hit the big time as a blogger, do you still practice law? Are you any good at it?

S.Ct. Haiku: I’m confident that I’m America’s Finest Lawyer With A Blog Written Almost Entirely In Haiku.TM

Law and The Multiverse: We’ve been very lucky with a book deal and some other arrangements, but not quite “quit your day job” lucky. Our clients tell us we’re good lawyers, but like all celebrities we have very fragile egos, so they may just be protecting us.

Prime-Time Crime: I resigned from the D.C. U.S. Attorney’s Office last June. Now I just write thrillers … about practicing law.

ZombieLaw: Yes and yes. Mostly criminal defense but also other unique individual representation.

10. If you could meet one lawyer, living or dead, and clean his or her bathroom, who would it be?

Law and The Multiverse: Justice Kagan seems like she keeps a tidy house.

ZombieLaw: When you say “clean his or her bathroom,” is that a euphemism? If not, it should be. Either way, I guess I would clean Justice Cardozo’s bathroom and try to see how much of that consideration he found before breakfast had come out before lunch.

S.Ct. Haiku: I will not be tricked into cleaning anyone else’s bathroom, thank you very much.

11. Do you have any advice for people who are thinking about leaving their day jobs and going into writing?

S.Ct. Haiku: If you make ten times as much as I do writing, you’ll have zero dollars.

ZombieLaw: If you were able to get a day job then you should probably try to keep it. Of course you feel like a zombie… but the cure for zombie condition is not quitting your job – it’s laughter, a pinch of salt and puppies.

The Prime-Time Crime Review: Keep your day job for now; publishing is an unpredictable place these days. Write first thing in the morning, when you’re fresh. Write without inhibitions, even if you think the prose is terrible at first. You can’t be a perfectionist about your first draft. A lot of writing is editing – let yourself put the words out there so you have something to edit later.

I’m so thrilled to be joining the crew here at Murder She Writes! I can’t imagine a nicer place to yammer and blab every couple of weeks. I write a mystery series for St. Martin’s/Minotaur about fifty-year-old Stella Hardesty, a Missouri housewife who helps women take care of abusive husbands and boyfriends. And when I say “take care of,” I mean that when Stella’s on the job, those bad boys’ attitudes get permanently adjusted.

I live in Northern California with my husband and two teenagers, but years ago, when my kids were babies, I lived in Chicago next door to a wonderful woman named Linda.

Linda did it all. She had four delightful children, cooked beautiful meals, grew heirloom roses, and volunteered for lots of worthy causes. Linda greeted every day with flawless makeup and every hair in place.

Linda had only one teeny little flaw: her house was a little wee bit…disorderly.

Uh, that’s a polite way of saying it always looked like a hurricane had just blown through.

One day we were in the rec room and I was searching for something in her cabinets – probably one of the children we’d accidentally misplaced – and I opened the wrong door by mistake.

Now back then I wasn’t quite the no-holds-barred, gutter-mouthed woman I am today, and I was kinda startled. Intrigued, of course, but startled. I actually considered shutting the door and sparing my dear friend any embarassment but – well, it was just too tempting. I let the door fall open the rest of the way, and out of the cupboard tumbled the most astonishing collection of …

Well hang on just a sec. Before I tell you what was in that cupboard, let me ask you a question: when January rolls around, what’s the lead story on nearly every single women’s magazine? Is it Sexting: Not Just for Teens Anymore? Five Ways To Make Him Forget His Middle Name? Eight Erogenous Zones You Didn’t Even Know You Had?

No no no, my friends, try this:

When January rolls around, the same magazines that spend the eleven other months of the year pitching midlife va-voom have suddenly got a case of the spic’n’spans.

Yes, that’s right. In January, we don’t want fashion tips. We don’t want to be exhorted to lose those holiday pounds. We’re not in the mood for better health or well-behaved children. What we want is a place for everything and everything in its place.

And oh, friends, I fall for it every time – I decide this is the year I will GET ORGANIZED FOR GOOD.

Here are just a few of the follies of Januarys past:

One year, I sewed coverups for all the old-fashioned sinks in my house (these don’t seem to exist in California, but back in the midwest we all had ’em) just so I could hide clever caddies underneath that contained cleaning supplies. The idea was that I’d never have to leave the powder room to do a little impromptu sprucing because everything I needed was right there under a few yards of chintz. Instead, every time I took a comfy seat on the…y’know, I had a birds-eye view of what was really just a bucket o’ guilt dressed up in a skirt.

Another time I spent forty-five bucks on these gorgeous Italian art-paper file folders. Now I realize we’re just getting to know each other and all, and I should probably hold off on my darker secrets, particularly the ones that could get me in trouble with the IRS, but I can’t keep track of my expenses or jot down my mileage or hold onto a receipt to save my life. So I’m not sure why I figured that beautiful, unused filing system would make my tax preparer any happier than the equally-empty $1.99 job from Walgreens.

Then there was the time I decided that everything in the pantry was going into this modular storage system that fit together like DNA in a gene sequence. Tall containers for spaghetti. Big oblongs for cereal. Squat square ones for rice and beans. Blocky canisters for flour and sugar. It took me about eighteen straight hours and cost as much as my first car, and I had only managed to organize a single shelf when my husband wandered in, took one look and said “Aw, great – how the hell am I ever going to find anything now?”

Which actually brings us back to my friend Linda. The thing that tumbled out of the her cupboards? Not sex toys, or red satin teddies, or special videos she and her hubby made on their honeymoon. It was a king’s ransom of Lock & Lock, enough to store not just every morsel of food, every leftover, every teabag in three counties, but also every crayon stub, binder clip, dry-cleaning coupon, and lego; every gift-with-purchase lipstick in a color she’d never wear; every mateless sock and mitten, cell-phone manual, hotel shampoo, and dog brush.

Not that all of those things were in the Lock & Lock. No, all of those plastic boxes were empty. But that was okay. Because what Linda was enamored with, what so many of us fall for year after year, isn’t so much organization but the potential for organization. The glorious possibility. Oh, deep down we know that the odds of us ever sorting through the sock drawer are about as high as learning conversational Mandarin or developing six-pack abs. But we still love to dream.

So tell me, in this time of resolutions and good intentions, what organizational fantasy really gets your motor running? You can tell me, sugar, just lean in close and whisper…is it California Closets? Matching spice jars with calligraphy labels? Huggable hangers from HSN? It’ll be our little secret…and just to make it fun, I’ll select one comment at random and send you a copy of A BAD DAY FOR SORRY, the first book in the Stella Hardesty series!

My last couple of blog entries, I’ve been breaking down how to write humor. The problem with looking at the nuts and bolts of the craft of humor is that the craft itself isn’t funny. It’s like a magician showing you how the trick is done: cool to see, but ultimately, sort of a let down because it’s no longer magic.

That said, if you want to catch up to where we are today, check how Part One and Part Two and then come back. We’ll wait. Go on, scamper.

I left off in the middle of listing some mechanisms for humor. This is not going to be an exhaustive list (cannot stress that enough). Think of them as handy brainstorming guidelines, but be aware that you can combine them, as well. Okay, lessee…. up next is:

Exaggeration / HYPERBOLE —

This is one of my favorites (go figure) because it can be used subtly (yep, I know, seems like a contradiction in terms: subtle exaggeration), and it can be used balls out.

Subtle: She loved the pie so much, she’d marry it if it were legal. Which it probably was, in the deep south. So long as it was a Christian pie.

Big: She knew she wanted that man. She had always known. The Universe had known. Eleventy billion years ago, some DNA somewhere paired up with some other DNA and they hatched a plan so that right now, at this moment, she would be here in this spot where she’d see him walking across the vast, empty parking lot, and she’d be able, with just the right touch, to stomp on the gas pedal of her little Prius and get up enough speed to mow his lying, cheating, bastard ass down without a single witness in sight. The Universe was smart like that.

“I’m stunned they don’t have your picture with a slash through it out here somewhere,” Riles muttered. “That’s a class-action lawsuit begging to happen.”

Misguided proclamations —

A moment later, in the bar inside the casino, Bobbie Faye is assuring the bar’s owner, Suds, that she is not going to cause any harm to his establishment.

“I promise, Suds. That last time was a total accident.”

“Honey, you took a chainsaw to three booths.”

“They beat up Lori Ann after school.”

“I know, Sugar, I’d have held the idiots down for you, but the booths were innocent.”

…and a couple of exchanges later…

“I’ll make this quick and clean and then we’ll be outta here. Give me some time before you call the cops.”

And by this point, anyone who’s read anything about Bobbie Faye knows that place is toast. At that point, it’s just a matter of how it will unfold.

Other misguided proclamations occur when we see, for example, that there is a problem, but the person the scene is focused on tries to imply that there isn’t one by claiming, “Oh, move along, nothing to see, all is well.” The comedy comes in the anticipation of how bad that is going to rubberband back on them.

Shock Value —

Socially inappropriate behavior will either horrify us or make us laugh, and sometimes, both at the same time. Someone naked where they aren’t supposed to be, someone saying the first thing that comes to their mind when they shouldn’t, someone acting completely age inappropriate or status inappropriate. For example, if you saw Queen Elizabeth on a YouTube video humping the leg of her husband, you’d be horrified. If she were drunk and people were trying to stop her, but afraid to touch her, but trying desperately to salvage her dignity, you’d be laughing. If she were humping the leg of a gorilla, you’d probably be in tears.

The problem with shock value is that it can almost immediately backfire on you if the reader / viewer thinks too much about what they’re seeing. It elicits a purely visceral, fast reaction, but we are also almost always embarrassed by the fact that we found something like that funny. To pull this one off requires a lot of perfect timing if it’s going to be the central moment around which the comedy is built. Alternately, shock value can be the premise of an entire piece which does gag after gag after gag. (Monty Python stuff, lots of slapstick comedies, farce and satire utilize shock value frequently.)

Comeuppance —

This is when the bad guy gets his due, done in a funny way. The easiest example is when Daffy Duck has grabbed away the gun from Elmer Fudd (I believe) because he’s being selfish and screams, “Mine! Mine! Mine!” and it goes off, blowing his beak around to the back of his head. Or when Wile E Coyote is determined to trick the poor Road Runner and ends up off the edge of the cliff himself, scrambling for purchase of thin air, knowing he is doomed.

(Obviously, this is used with non-cartoon moments. But you cannot help but love Daffy and Wile E.)

Humiliation / Self-Deprecation —

Entire careers can be made off these two. For humiliation, think Jim Carrey in LIAR LIAR. In that movie, Fletcher, an attorney, cannot lie for 24 hours due to the birthday wish of his young son, and the truth-telling is about to kill him because he has no control over it. Here’s one of many exchanges:

Charles: Ehm, look. Sorry, sorry. I just, ehm, well, this is a very stupid question and… , particularly in view of our recent shopping excursion, but I just wondered, by any chance, ehm, eh, I mean obviously not because I guess I’ve only slept with 9 people, but-but I-I just wondered… ehh. I really feel, ehh, in short, to recap it slightly in a clearer version, eh, the words of David Cassidy in fact, eh, while he was still with the Partridge family, eh, “I think I love you,” and eh, I-I just wondered by any chance you wouldn’t like to… Eh… Eh… No, no, no of course not… I’m an idiot, he’s not… Excellent, excellent, fantastic, eh, I was gonna say lovely to see you, sorry to disturb… Better get on…Carrie: That was very romantic.Charles: Well, I thought it over a lot, you know, I wanted to get it just right.

and here, this one is his friend, Tom, speaking:

Tom: Oh, I don’t know, Charlie. Unlike you, I never expected “the thunderbolt.” I always just hoped that, that I’d meet some nice friendly girl, like the look of her, hope the look of me didn’t make her physically sick, then pop the question and, um, settle down and be happy. It worked for my parents. Well, apart from the divorce and all that.

and here:

Tom: The great advantage of having a reputation for being stupid: People are less suspicious of you.

(By the way, if you want to learn to write humor, read all of Crusie’s books. WELCOME TO TEMPTATION is probably my favorite.)

Okay, that’s enough for today. Next time, I have a couple more mechanisms I want to cover, and then talk about how to use these. I’ll try to do some before/after to show you how I start with an idea and work it so that it’s funny. I’m hoping to show how to use this in dark moments as well as in comedy.

For today, how about naming any funny book you’ve read, OR funny movie. Let’s compile a list of favorites. If there’s something in there that made you laugh, I’d love to see it. Also, if you have a request on how to make something funny that you have worked on and feel just isn’t working yet, feel free to put it up or send it to me via email with the caveat that I can use it here, and I’ll try to workshop those with you.

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Bio:

Allison Brennan

Allison Brennan is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of nearly three dozen romantic thrillers and mysteries, including the Lucy Kincaid series and the Max Revere series. She lives in Northern California with her husband, five children, and assorted pets.